We now know that as bloggers we need to create quality content over quantity, no longer
will Google or website visitors accept useless short posts of nothing. We need to give our blog visitors quality content.

The problem comes when we decide how much content we need to post each week. Do you want your business to grow and flourish? Is your blog going to be your main source of income? If the answer to both questions is yes then you need to not only deliver quality content you have to deliver bucket loads of it.

Quality trumps quantity but a large quantity of quality wins hands down. If you write an incredible post readers will want to come back and read more, due to time constraints they might only be able to read one post a day so they return another day to read more but if they see the same post on your front page they will leave. Hopefully they will return another day but if they see that nothing new has been added to your front page they will leave and probably never return.

So what do you do to prevent people leaving and never returning? The only real answer is to produce more top quality posts and publish them on a regular basis. Different niches will require more or less, if your blog is about celebrities then you will require to post more than once a day otherwise your blog will not rise through the ranks. Can you create 3 or 4 quality celebrity posts a day?

Writing good quality blog posts can be hard work. Just this week I have written over 5 and some of them were seriously long posts and believe me they took some work. I had several moments of brain freezes and writers block, I didn’t know which way to think some times.

If your niche allows you to write one excellent post each month and still make you money then that is excellent but in reality there are millions of blogs battling for dominance and a share of all the traffic. You need to step up and make sure you keep your share. You cannot afford to allow your visitors to move on to your competition.

Yes that is right I do say that, I went there because that is how I roll. Competition is exactly what the majority of the other blogs are to us. I do believe in the ‘friendly’ blogosphere and I believe in networking.

I believe in sending traffic to other posts and helping out my fellow bloggers but if my site was the only one around then I would be raking in the money, but I am not the only site, I am one of millions and every other blog in my niche that makes a commission or a sale dilutes my profits so yes, even though they are good people and my friends they are my competition.

A good competition though, with competition we are forced to up our game and give the best quality and service we can otherwise we lose. Never underestimate the power of having competition.

So you see it is imperative that we create a lasting impression on our readers and give them enough incentives to keep them returning back to our sites. We need the traffic; we need it in large numbers so that we can charge premium rates for our private advertising and so we have a greater opportunity to be able to sell more than one or two products per month.

Traffic is very important in this game, returning traffic is even better. Having an eager crowd of loyal visitors is what you need. Quality content is king that we know; delivering a quantity of quality content is what you should be aiming at. So if you are unable to write it all yourself, what can you do?

Open up your site to guest posts. (Freelance writers)

I think I heard you all groan then, you are probably thinking that I mean the type of guest posts that you get offered by email. No far from it, I am saying that you should open your site up to good writers who write posts that match yours in quality. There are many out there who want to build exposure and be seen, who want links back to their own sites.

These writers would go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that they give you a post that would benefit your site and your readers. Take BloggingTips.com, it is owned by Zac Johnson but has a team of writers, these writers have their own websites and do not get any monetary return from publishing posts on Bloggingtips.com. I could be wrong but, I have now been given my own author account on the site and I am doing it for the exposure.

Once you have built up your site to a point that you can take on other writers then you can take the pressure off of yourself. Writers can create content that you schedule to go out at specific times leaving you to focus on the other important jobs that building a successful online business entails like sharing content on social media, blog commenting, WordPress maintenance and advertising.

Building a business is done in stages; with blogging your first stage is to publish a large quantity of quality content to get noticed and rewarded by Google who will push you up the rankings. You create a network of readers and become recognised in your niche by commenting on other blogs and doing guest postings.

Eventually this work will bring you a nice number of monthly visitors which will entice other writers who will happily write for your blog because they want to borrow your traffic. If you posted every day then you could get six writers who could write one post each week, leaving you to write one a week if you wanted to then that is your full weeks content taken care of.

You simply keep an eye on the quality and reject anything that you think is not good enough for your site or your readers. I recommend that you take writers who are only writing to build traffic and branding for their own sites.

I have received many emails from writers offering guest posts that have been paid to send traffic to sites they do not own often promoting products like fast payday loans or other such rubbish that could harm your reputation. (That is just an opinion, you may think differently)

I would recommend giving each one of your writers their own author account on your WordPress site so they can log in and schedule their posts leaving you to do your reviews and add any affiliate links you might have.

There are several networks that you can join to find people offering posts to be used on other people’s sites as guest posts. MyBlogGuest.com, GuestBlogIt.com, BlogSynergy.com and Guestr.com are four such networks amongst many that you can use to find good writers.

As I write this I hear that Google are thinking of doing a new update penalizing sites that use guest posts on a regular basis. Google do not like links that are gained unethically, in their opinion, doing something in exchange for a link or two back to their site is unethical. Guest what? This is exactly what guest posts do.

People write an article in exchange for links back to their site and to gain exposure, to Google this is a spam link. We might think that adding links in the author bio is good, but again guess what? To Google it is irrelevant where the link is placed, if a link is gained from writing an article wherever it is on the page, it is wrong.

It has also been said that Google will use the words ‘Guest Post’ ‘Guest Blogger’ and any other hint that a post has been written by a ‘guest’ as nothing more than an attempt to gain a link. If they detect these word phrases on your site you might soon be penalized. So it could be worth doing some ‘future proofing’ and start using the terms ‘staff writer’ or ‘freelance writer’ and maybe even ‘article by…’. If you create a team of writers then simple use their name.

The other solution is to start a Facebook group or Google+ community and build up a network of like minded people where you will eventually find a few select bloggers who you could approach. Many will say yes, after all they get to promote their name and website in front of your traffic as well as get a link back to their sites.

This is all good for you, not only do you now get your site filled up with regular good content from writers you trust but writers who want to build up a following and a brand will promote their posts across their own social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ sending more free traffic to you.

Having your own controlled groups and communities can have other added benefits, not only do you find great writers, you make plenty of great friends who will give you great ideas for your business and will often happily share your posts even without you asking. If not, occasionally asking the group nicely would have your posts shared to thousands more people within a matter of minutes.

Regular quality content takes time to create and if you wish to create a large quantity of quality content then you will need to think ahead and work out a way to get the content without hurting your head or your finger tips. I hope that I have given you some new ideas for generating posts for your site and help build up your blogging business.

Wordpress is a fantastic tool for bloggers and internet marketers who need to make websites fast, the problem with WordPress is that the most basic WordPress Theme does not have a sales page template. This makes creating those most needed sales and squeeze pages a long winded job.

The first sales page I ever made in WordPress required me to upload a separate page template into the Themes folder in the Cpanel part of my website. This was a big faff, if I decided to change my WordPress Theme, I would need to upload the template into the files of each Theme I used.

The other option is to buy a specialised WordPress Theme like Optimised Press or Premise, these Themes have sales page and squeeze page templates built into them.

They are seriously good Themes but if you decide to change your Theme then you will lose your templates again. You shouldn’t need to change Themes if you have found one you like but every now and again you might want to give your site a fresher new look.

The only real good way of saving your special crafted sales and squeeze pages is to use a plugin. When a Themes changed the plugin stays in place. Well I have great news for you, there is an excellent new plugin called Paper Template that builds excellent sales pages.

Paper Template is great because this plugins comes pre packed with 50 pre written headlines, 70 plus bullet points with text which are fully editable and some great guarantee boxes and images. Simply add them and then edit them to how you like.

This makes building a perfect sales page very easy without the hassle of hiring someone to do the copy for you. All you need to do is edit the areas required and add your content and you are done. It isn’t just sales pages that you can build, you can add opt in forms to create landing pages for building email lists.

Adding payment options like PayPal buttons and email opt-in forms like those created in Aweber can be added to the page in a very easy 3 step process.

You click the cursor in the editor where you want your buttons and opt-in forms,

Paste the code into a box below the editor,

Click on the Place Order Button In The Post.

Please note, I had to deactivate the CK Editor plugin for this plugin to work properly as it is designed to work with the standard WordPress editor. I believe other editor plugins like TinyMCE will also need to be deactivated, however for me it wasn’t an issue as I hardly use any of the other tools you get when using the CK Editor.

The price for this incredible plugin is only $17 which for anyone in the UK is less than £12 which is an incredible price and one rarely seen in the internet marketing industry. (This could be an introductory offer and I expect it to go up soon so I suggest you go and take a look pretty quickly.)

As I am sure you can have already realised, when I learned how cheap it was I bought my own copy and installed it on this site. This is incredible value for money, when you also consider that you can use it on unlimited amount of personal sites and you get lifetime access to a members area where you can watch excellent training videos and see what other excellent plugins the developers have available to buy at incredible prices.

If you intend to build sites for clients or eventually sell your own then you need to buy the developer licence.

Google Sniper was a bestselling information product that was sold on Clickbank a few years ago that showed you how to create a niche based website in a matter of days and then get it ranked on the first page of Goole for a certain keyword.

The idea was that these websites would sit high in Google’s rankings and pull in free traffic which would be converted into affiliate commissions.

Each site would be built specifically for one affiliate product for example a website called SimpleWaysToCurePanicAttacks.com would be based around a Clickbank product that was created to help panic attack sufferers, such product would pay out 50%-75% commission on each one sold.

Many Clickbank products had up sells that cost several hundred dollars and as an affiliate you would get a large share of any money made from them as well as the commission from the front end product your website would promote.

A simple niche site can cost as little as £60 a year to host, even less if your hosting account allowed unlimited domains and you use that to host several sniper sites. Selling just one or two products a month would make a lot more than what you would pay out annually for the websites.

Having several of these sites selling different products each month would make the owners a nice monthly wage. These sites were created, ranked high in Google then left to generate money on autopilot.

Google decide that it wanted to clean up its search results and reward sites that were constantly growing and evolving with higher rankings and those that were thin on content and untouched were dropped. This was to give internet users a better experience and give them the quality information they needed.

Google rate growing sites that have lots of regularly added unique quality content and large numbers of visitors, this means that the simple niche sites should no longer get a look in when it comes to the rankings.

If Google are now paying attention to these content based sites, is there a way to use their strengths to create simple niche based websites that rank in Google for certain keywords similar to the old Google Sniper system?

I believe sub domains could be the answer, a sub domain is an attachment to your site… subdomain.yourdomain.com, for example I have a WordPress theme installed on Jobs.InternetMarketing-Advice.net which is a separate site created for job placements only. It has nothing to do with the posts on the main site but because it is a sub domain it can benefit from the strength that the main site has.

Subdomains are generally used for 3 things…

1 Different Locations: Sites that cover say all of the USA would have separate sites for each state under the main umbrella like california.alloftheusa.com

2 Different Products: Sites like big ecommerce sites will have products or ranges on separate subdomains like kitchenware.householdgoods.com

3 Franchises: Big companies that sell franchises set up websites under a main umbrella and list different franchises on separate subdomains like londonbagelstore.thebagelstore.com

Subdomains are better than subdirectories… yourdomain.com/subdirectory because each subdomain is classed as a separate website.

Most hosting accounts allow you to create many if not unlimited subdomains. WordPress can be installed to each subdomain just like a normal domain. You can call a subdomain whatever you want, there is nothing stopping you from targeting a keyword, obviously a long tail keyword would create one long messy URL. Ie HowToMakeMoneyOnline.InternetMarketing-Advice.net.

The biggest issue you would have when creating subdomain mini niche sites is the room they will take up on your server space. WordPress has a fair few files and can take up a lot of space, I have a friend who is a developer and he hates WordPress but unless you are a developer and like coding your own sites WordPress is a godsend and an important weapon in the Google Snipers arsenal.

Will Subdomain Mini Niche Sites Become The New Google Sniper Sites?

As far as Google is concerned, each subdomain is classed as a separate website ranking for its own content and keywords giving you the opportunity to create more rank domination. Your main site and several subdomains could in theory end up on the same Google page squeezing out the competition.

In the summer of 2011 Google decided that links between subdomains were considered as internal links which gives both the subdomains and the main domain an increased chance of ranking high in Google. Google loves external and internal links. If your main site becomes an authority site your subdomins will be pulled up by its strength in a kind of gravitational pull.

What this means is that each subdomain can be built around a keyword and product and can be ranked in Google as a separate website but benefit from having a ‘bigger stronger brother’

If you try to target many products or locations on one website there would not be enough product content on the site for Search Engines to give priority over the main product/location the website is originally optimised for. Because subdomains can be optimised for their own products and keywords search engines will give each subdomain the priority it requires.

Creating mini sites that are 5 -6 pages deep associated with affiliated products that are actually subdomains and linked to your main site could be a way round the recent Google updates that destroyed many of the Google Sniper sites.

The more you do, the more WordPress installations you use and the more content you create will use up disk space so you might need to change your hosting package one day and pay more per month but if you are making affiliate commissions from your subdomains what is a little extra cost?

Creating a subdomain is simple, you access your cpanel account which is where you go to install WordPress,

Scroll down to the section Domains and click on the Subdomains icon.

Once inside you will be given the option to create a subdomain, simply type in the name of your subdomain in the box and hit Create. Your new subdomain is now created.

Once your subdomain is created you can now go and install WordPress on it. Making sure your install it to the subdomain and not accidentally write over your main domain, but I know you know how to do that.

So do you think subdomains can and will become the new Google Sniper set up? Please let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments section.

I am writing this mainly for those who are working from home either in the evenings or weekends trying to build up a business that will one day free them of the day job. Of course people who are working from home full time could still benefit from this post. It all depends on how they manage their work and time during the day.

This might be a short post as the most important tips for increasing productivity are few. Some people write long winded posts giving as many ideas as possible but in truth the real way to increase productivity at work is get rid of all distraction. Simple!

Many hours of valuable time is wasted by distractions. In reality for most of us four hours of work can be reduced to one or two pure focused hours leaving you more time to relax and chill, or do more work, whatever you want to spend your time on.

What normally happens is this, people sit down to work at home on the computer and within a few minutes they will be checking emails, searching YouTube for videos and texting, myself included. I am not sure why, but it does seem to be a human trait, most of us do it.

We cannot help but be distracted; it probably has a lot to do with the genetic make-up of humans. We are pleasure seekers, we desire happiness. Scientists have told us that this desire is what makes us grow and evolve, without it we probably would have died out long ago.

Interestingly the most successful people are often successful because they enjoy the work they do so doing more of it fills their desires for pleasure and enjoyment.

Most of us know that if we totally focused on doing what needs doing then we would probably be done in half the time and then we can relax, have fun and chill. Whatever your time scale is, it could be hours, days, weeks or even years, the more we do undistracted and with complete focus, the faster we will get to what it is we want.

The life we live now is nothing but the results from what we have already done. JK Rowling is an author and multi-millionaire because she wrote books, if she sat on a sofa eating crisps every night watching TV wanting to be an author then she would not be an author or wealthy. She would be an unhealthy overweight Coronation St fan probably.

The pain of working hard and being seriously disciplined can scare us and make us hold back a bit but in the long run, after years of wasting a lot of time, looking back and realising that you could have reached your goal earlier if you had been more focused, more disciplined and more committed which resulted in more free time to enjoy life will hurt even more.

We sit down with good intentions of getting as much work done as possible but we are soon distracted, and sadly we often happily allow ourselves to become distracted.

If you are an evening blogger or writer it is possible that you will have family around and if you do not have the space in your home to work away from everyone then the chances are you will be in the lounge on the table while the children or the better half is sat watching TV.

It won’t take long before you are soon chatting about what is on the TV or sat at the table staring at the TV yourself. I know, I do it!

When you are distracted work doesn’t get done, so you carry on until it is finished then by the end of the night you might get moaned at for being ‘pre occupied’ for five or six hours and not spending the time with your family.

It is only right and fair that you spend time with your loved ones but getting that work done is equally important, after all, if you want or need to change your life or circumstance, then the only way to get different results is to do different things.

“If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.” – Tony Robbins

You need a balance and trying to get a balance is hard but it must be done. Discipline is important but interestingly the discipline needed will actually make your life easier, and you will get more done in the long run. The more you get done then the less frustrated you will be and you will become more relaxed.

How To Increase Productivity In The Workplace

Make a space in your house away from everyone, even if you have to use a fold away table in the bedroom so you are not distracted. Turn off your mobile phone or leave it on a shelf away from you.

Check your emails if you must, or write it in as part of a plan, do it every other day then leave the other days free to get on with other jobs like producing content.

Create a schedule of what to do each day or evening and stick to it, having a plan and schedule can keep us focused and direct our attention otherwise we will be bumbling around between half jobs and wondering what to do next.

Make sure you do not have Facebook or Twitter open; it is so easy to get into chats and commenting on things that are not relevant. Do that in your chill time unless it is your business account and that is what you have scheduled for the hour.

Turn music off, as a lover of music this one is difficult, sometimes music can help me work better and I know many others would say the same. The choice of music is vital if you insist on having some on while you work. I try and have some Ibiza style chill out music playing so I am not distracted by heavy energetic bass lines, beats or vocals otherwise I would be dancing around the room like a loon.

However even chill out music can still have me drifting off into imagined scenes of sun kissed beaches with blue skies and clear seas. Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and listen to the music. What happens when I drift off into Secret Insider Land? Nothing! As far as productive work is concerned.

My better half is often right, she tells me to switch it all off completely, turn it all off and work for a few pure undisturbed hours and you will get far more done, especially if you have a plan to follow as soon as you sit down.

Newbie bloggers can get distracted with statistics, we all know the importance of getting site visitors and we want to see the amounts increase each week but checking them every 5 or 10 minutes will not help us to be more productive.

Ironically, the number of visitors we get would more likely increase if we got more articles and posts written. If you add up the time spent checking on site statistics and social media comments you will probably find that over a week you would have wasted the amount of time needed to write 1 or 2 great posts.

Sometimes we delude ourselves by saying that ‘checking social media comments and answering questions’ is working and being business like, in some ways it is, but if every time we sit down to work we spend an hour two doing that, nothing gets done.

I bet if you read back all those comments and answers you will see that they are probably not that important and beneficial to your work anyway making them a waste of your time. Not good!

I know, as I write this I have ended up in a Facebook chat which I am bringing to a quick end now! I needed to thank someone for sharing a post and then out of nowhere he replied with questions… Aggrrr.

I sit here watching as my time is slowly draining away. Fortunately I realise that and have now stopped the conversation otherwise this post will not get finished as quick as it could, sorry I mean ‘as quick as it should’.

You need to develop an anti-social attitude to social media, sounds strange but you must otherwise you will be sat wasting your time playing Zynga games and chatting most nights and when the new year arrives you would be wondering why you are still stuck in the same old rut you are trying to escape from.

The New Year has started, it is now 2013, so how did you get on in 2012? Have you done what needed doing? Are you where you wanted to be? If not, don’t berate yourself, now is the time to start and get back on track, make 2013 a great year. Turn off all distractions when you sit down to work. Schedule some proper time to do your work, decide what you are doing each time and really focus. When you do, you will be done quicker, taking you nearer to the results you desire or at least giving you some of your evening back.- SI

I thought I would share with you a book that I am currently reading, it is a kind of review however I haven’t yet finished it but I am so far in, fully enjoying it and believe I can give you my opinion and thoughts on it.

The book is ‘Day Jobs Suck’ by Patrick Meninga, Patrick is a frugality ninja, which means he lives free not just by earning good money but he also saves money and has created an incredible simple life for himself. Now you might suddenly start to panic and think that means he is living like a monk and has no form of technology in the house but you should stop now because you would be wrong.

Let me first tell you this, Patrick has achieved something many of us want yet never do, he has worked every hour spare to create a website that grew to a point where it was earning $2000 a month in revenue from advertising and he then went on to sell that same site for $200,000 to one of the companies who advertised on the it.

He then used that money to create a life free from the restraints and needs of having a day job by investing it wisely. For a bit of extra pocket money and to cover small monthly costs Patrick spends a bit of time doing some freelance writing for clients one of which are the new owners of his old site.

Patrick is an Olympic writer, when he was building up his site he would write several thousand words a day, in one month he created more articles for his blog than most blogs publish in a couple of years! He has written several eBooks and recently published his first on Amazon Kindle store which is the one I am reading now.

As I said earlier, he is an Olympic writer, as soon as I had downloaded this book and started reading it he had written and published his second eBook on Kindle called ‘Quantum Happiness’

So back to ‘Day Jobs Suck’ In this book Patrick discusses the difference between being Rich and being Wealthy. Rich is where you work hard to earn a lot of money but you are still a consumer trapped in the work-spend cycle so you spend more of your earnings going through a Lifestyle Inflation.

A lifestyle inflation is when you get a bigger house, buy a bigger car or start holidaying in bigger more expensive hotels once you start to earn more money.

Ideally you would invest that money to create passive income that would free up your time and reduce stresses and strains of modern life. A rich person may play hard but they work hard and without realizing it they create a life where the harder they play the harder they have to work.

A wealthy person however is the opposite, they have enough money whether it is incoming each month from passive income or as savings where they can live and enjoy life without the stress of having a day job. A wealthy person will relax in the sun more on a day to day basis than the rich person who pays through the nose to go to a sunny country to relax.

A wealthy man will not need to work hard again to enjoy another fortnight of relaxing. Patrick brings up a really good point about the cost of having a day job. Stress, misery, bad health is costly and we buy that lifestyle by simply wanting new shiny toys which means we work harder and longer to buy the items we think we need to relax and chill.

It is an ironic cycle of stupidity, we work hard to earn money so we can afford to slow down and relax! How stupid is that?

Patrick sets out to show us that without realizing it many of us are actually trapped in a misery of our own making and with conscious decisions we can free ourselves of many of the restraints we have built.

In one chapter he states that he himself cannot go out and buy a Ferrari but he could go the next 3 years without any paid work whatsoever. I don’t know about you but to me that is an awesome position to be in. That is the reason I turned to learning how to make money online, I imagine it is the same for you. Isn’t that what you want? Time and money freedom?

Patrick has an incredible way of looking at things which open up your mind in a Zen like manner, he once said that a dollar earned is taxed, but a dollar saved is tax free, or words to that effect and that really got me thinking.

It is so true, we can work hard to earn more money so we can buy the things we probably don’t want or need and a lot of the money is then handed over to the Governments. I won’t get too political but if you are like me, there will be plenty of things our Governments spend money on that we don’t agree with.

I for one do not agree with the countless billions the UK Government has spent on military actions in Afghanistan or Iraq, working less taxable hours would mean less of my money going to such issues.

I remember when I worked in a wood working factory, a work friend called Mark realized that from 7:30 in the morning when we started to our first tea break was pure tax money. We were working two solid hours every morning for money we were simply handing away. I found that hard to swallow. That is slightly going off on a tangent so lets’ get back to Patrick’s book ‘Day jobs Suck’

I am really loving this book, it is a breath of fresh air in a world of ‘work hard and make more money’ pressure. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for people working hard and getting results, I am all for people earning money if they need it. I cannot stand people who moan that they are skint but do not do anything about it.

I get tired of hearing people say that they do not have a life or can afford to do stuff when they, like Patrick says, go and buy a big house or expensive car only to leave themselves with no spare money. They appear rich, they get good wages but it is all taken as soon as they earn it.

I have created many problems in my quest to make more money and learn how to earn, I do know that it will pay off because I intend it to, however let me be open with you, I have chained myself up more for which I am now regretting.

One of the things I truly loved when I worked for myself was to sit in my hammock in my garden on a lovely sunny day, listening to some great music and chill in the sun. It was free and I was able to do it regularly but since I chased this dream and went to work for a top UK marketer I had to move away, rent out my house, live in a small and expensive apartment with no garden, surrounded with trees.

Not only do I hardly see the sun these days now I have rejoined the day job (to learn how to leave the day job! How ironic) I haven’t sat in my hammock out in the fresh air and sun for nearly two years now. I really miss that.

Interestingly I have created more chains for myself so I could learn to escape them, my regret is that I didn’t know Patrick then and that he hadn’t written this book two years ago!

If you are seriously thinking of escaping the rat race, taking a step back from stress and pressure and want to really live a fun life then I highly recommend this book and I also suggest you get to know Patrick as I am sure you will get a lot from him.

‘Day Jobs suck’ is available from Amazon Kindle for an incredible £1.94 $3.14

My Internet Marketing Advice site will probably seem from the outside to be very pro blogging and you are right, it is. The main reason for this is that it is one of the best forms of internet marketing about. It is long lasting and a lot more respectful and ethical than many other forms of online marketing. With blogging you can make a lot of money without giving yourself a bad name.

Sounds good doesn’t it? After all, I know you want a long lasting respectful business that keeps on generating money, isn’t that right? I am sure you do not want to earn a few fast £$ then nothing again, what is the sense in all of that? That unfortunately is what most Internet Marketing guru types will have you doing, before you know it you will get a bad reputation as a scammer or spammer before you really got started.

If you are wanting to make a few thousand pounds in the next 48 hours I advise you to lower those expectations now, they only happen to seasoned internet marketers who have a huge following of people all hungry for the next get rich quick product that doesn’t work!

It certainly won’t happen with blogging, but in the future it is possible you could be making $40k+ a month from blogging like Pat Flynn does… So why should you focus your attentions on blogging?

Have a potential large readership and email list to sell your own products to

Have a sellable asset that can be sold for several thousand pounds

Get a fantastic reputation as an expert and build yourself into a brand.

Before you rush out and start blogging I would advise you to take into consideration these few things. Blogging can be…

Hard work

Constant work

A long term project.

A while before you see any money come in (this is not always the case though)

Now I am not one to feed you bullshit or blow smoke up your arse, blogging is a full time business and can be a lot of hard work. It can be set up so that you eventually streamline the job down to working only a few hours each week and get back maximum returns. It is one of the best business models around and one of the cheapest start ups; if you are not afraid of a bit of hard work you will be rewarded greatly for your efforts.

So, if after my advice you decide to try out blogging for yourself, and why wouldn’t you? Then what do you blog about? The truth is this… you should blog about what you love and what you know. Makes sense doesn’t it? But people get the idea they should get involved in a niche that has a lot of money in it even if they know nothing whatsoever about that market.

It is possible to become successful in a niche or industry you know nothing about but it is a lot of hard work and very rare that you will succeed unless you build your blog like a property developer, investing money into it by getting other people to do the necessary work like writing content and building the site. This can be a very expensive method, if you do not have the funds then stay well away from it.

The easiest and cheapest method is to do most of the work yourself at the beginning and for that you will need to create a blog that covers a topic you love. Something you eat, breathe and sleep, when you know a lot about something then you can write about it more. Imagine trying to write about a topic everyday or every week when you know nothing about it or simply are not interested in it. You would lack motivation and the chances are you will more likely give up.

It is important that you choose something that you love, in turn; doing what you love will soon grow into loving what you do. Simple!

Take music as an example, let’s say you love Hip Hop, everyday you listen to Rap and Hip Hop music, you watch Hip Hop shows and music channels, you know a lot about the history of Hip Hop like the graffiti and break dancing that was associated with it in the 1980s and the people who started it all in and around New York.

Also in your spare time you make your own Hip Hop music on your computer, you buy and sell old Hip Hop vinyl and design your own street clothing, everyday you eat, breathe and sleep Hip Hop. Hip Hop was your life, whereas Opera, you knew nothing about Opera.

Would you even consider creating a blog on Opera music? What if you couldn’t stand that kind of singing let alone understand it? So if someone told you Opera was huge and very popular on line with a lot of money to be made from advertising & ticket sales etc, a lot more money than what was in the Hip Hop market, would you be wise to go ahead and work on that Opera blog?

NO! Of course not and here is why…

Building the blog on Opera would probably have a strong fast start but after a week or two of researching for information to write in posts, sitting and listening to loads of YouTube videos to share on your site and finding it hard to like and differentiate between what is good or bad because as far as you are concerned it is all bad, your motivation and enjoyment will be so low you would find excuses to do other things!

Trust me, if you are not enjoying the subject matter, you will find other things to do. You would be easily distracted and the blog will not grow because you are not adding new content to it or maintaining it. It will fail, mark my words.

With the Hip Hop blog, expressing an opinion on new releases would be second nature to you so writing a few new reviews on music would be enjoyable and done without any self pushing required. Searching for information and YouTube videos of the best old and new school Hip Hop would not seem like work but instead would be a pleasure. Adding new content and sourcing out affiliate markets would be something that you look forward to doing and can be done while listening to your favourite music.

A hobby is pleasure, when work is based around a hobby then work becomes a pleasure. We humans are pleasure seekers, we love pleasure, we love doing what we enjoy, and we will do more of what we enjoy. So why not do something you enjoy as the topic of your blog?

You see if you do a blog on a niche that you love, you add more content to the site and focus more of your time and energy on the site, it cannot do anything but grow. When it grows and spreads across the internet more and more people will come to your site. More and more visitors mean more and more opportunity to make money from your blog.

Even if the niche you have chosen has less money in the market than other niches, you will make more because of the size and reputation your blog has got from the attention and love you have spent on it. Does that make sense?

A fully working Hip Hop blog with a growing fan base will always make more than a semi derelict Opera blog that has the occasional passer by popping in and then running away fast because there is very little for them to read.

With there being over 7 billion people living on planet Earth with well over 500 million of them living in the 5 main English speaking nations and not forgetting all those around the world who speak English as a second language, you will find that there are a lot of people who will have access to the internet and be interested in your niche whatever you choose.

If the niche is a popular one with a lot of competition that doesn’t mean you will fail or that you should not build your own blog in that niche. There are so many people who love your chosen niche that not all of them will know about your competition and many of them do not stick to just the one site.

I am amazed at how many Internet Marketing Guru’s that I have never heard about when I talk to other people in the industry. People have different circles to me yet they all fall into the same niche/industry. Occasionally a name will pop up and I will ask ‘have you ever heard of so and so?’ to a friend who will tell me they had been following them for years even though I knew nothing about that person until that day.

The word ‘Fan’ comes from ‘Fanatical’, people who love their hobbies are fans and when they love something with a passion they will seek out more information about what they love. Many fans will buy different books or CDs even if they are full of the same pictures and songs that they already have, they just wanted to buy the other version because this is what fans do.

Fans will go to conventions; they will dress up to look like their idols or passions no matter how daft they look. (As the image above shows clearly)

Just because a competitors blogsite has thousands of monthly visitors doesn’t mean that those visitors will not come to your site regularly. These people will visit several blogs all related to the same niche. It is basic human nature.

How To Turn Your Blog Into a Successful Blog

It is your job to fill your blog with a lot of quality content that is better than your competitors so that your site visitors return more and more and eventually favour your site over your competitors.

Remember the saying ‘It’s a big world out there’ well the internet is huge and at the same time small, I can be sat here in the UK and within seconds be reading a great post on a blog in Indonesia, I can chat and be networking with people from all around the world. Anyone anywhere can access your site if they have your web address (URL). (That is as long as they are fortunate to not live in a society with strict internet policies)

So before you go rushing out to start blogging thinking you are going to make millions, you need to sit down with your new best friend a note pad and paper and write down all the things that you love, things you enjoying doing, things you know a lot about and even things that you want to get involved in but haven’t yet started. Loving something and knowing a lot about something doesn’t mean that you do it everyday. A blog could be a great entry point for getting involved in that hobby.

As long as you have a strong interest and passion in the subject matter with a fair amount of knowledge then you are in a stronger position to build a successful blog that could make you the money you need to become both time and financially free.

Until next time,

SI

Want your own blog but not sure how to build one? Why not have me build it for you for FREE? For more details Click Here.

You will have noticed that most websites you visit these days have some form of advertising placed somewhere on the site, many have their whole site drench in advertising making you wonder if they actually have any returning readers!

It is well known that too much advertising and little or no content is bad for a blog in the eyes of both the visitor and Google yet having advertising on your blog is still one of the best things to do. When you have a good amount of monthly visitors to your blog having some advertising can not only help to pay for the costs associated with running a blog but can also earn you a nice chunk of extra revenue each month.

Yaro Starak the owner of www.Entrepreneur-Journey.com admitted that his blog makes between $4000 – $6000 each month from advertising alone, doesn’t that sound good? It certainly does to me!

Newcomers to the blogging world hear of Google AdSense and give that a whirl hoping to generate money from a few clicks or impressions. The amount is usually very small due to the nature of Google AdSense. It isn’t until you look a bit deeper that you notice that the big boys rarely use AdSense these days, they might have a few dotted around but they normally sell their advertising space to private advertisers via a page on their site or through networks like CrankyAds.com or BuySellAds.com.

What is the difference? Google AdSense can fluctuate each month depending on the amount of clicks or impressions each ad receives. The one great thing about Google AdSense is that whether an advertiser stops running the ad campaign that was running on your site Google will replace them automatically so you do not need to go looking for new advertising clients.

Private advertising however will leave the site owner with a nice chunk of cash each month that they know they are going to get without relying on their visitors having to do anything like clicking on adverts to generate earnings.

If the companies who have placed their advertising on a site are happy with the results they are getting they might advertise on a longer continuing basis meaning a nice continuous chunk of cash each month for the site owner. Get several of those advertisers and you will have a nice monthly income. Remember Yaro and his site generating $4000 plus? He wouldn’t earn that if he had AdSense instead of private advertising.

Advertising is one of the first easy ways to make money online, a lot of people made good money from Google AdSense, for anyone reading this who doesn’t know what Google AdSense is, it is part of the advertising network by Google which puts advertiser’s ads onto other people’s websites for maximum exposure.

The ads that are shown on sites are not just random they are matched up as best as possible to the content of the site. If a clear match cannot be made then they will put up some standard adverts but Google do try not to throw up any ads that will clash with the site content. The sceenshot below shows Google struggling to match an advert to South American UFOs

The website owner gets a percentage of the money the advertiser pays Google when the advert is either clicked or hit a certain number of impressions on that website.

This incredible system prompted people to create niche specific sites specifically designed for Google AdSense. The websites were often filled with semi vague information which would often leave the site visitor needing to click on the surrounding ads to get more information resulting in making money for the site owner.

Google tried to cut down on the amount of ads that were shown on sites and force sites to improve their quality to give the visitors a better experience, after all they want to put their ads on quality sites, that was what the network was designed for after all.

The problem with Google AdSense is that what you earn each month can vary a lot as it depends on the action of the sites visitors, where as with private advertising as long as you have a steady number of visitors and the advertiser is happy you will still get paid each month.

For the newbie blogger only starting out Google AdSense is a good start, you might earn a few £$ to help pay towards your running costs and maybe make a bit of profit while you build up your sites visitor numbers up to a point where you can start to sell advertising space to people for a premium rate.

The big boys that use advertising networks also have their own ‘Advertise With Us’ page to attract new clients who would like to advertise on the site who either …

Didn’t know of the advertising networks the sites use

Want to get a cheaper rate than what the network offers.

Remember networks charge a commission so big sites often charge more via networks to pull back some of the lost money. Approaching them directly can save the advertiser money.

When your site starts to get a nice amount of monthly visitors you can charge a premium amount for your advertising spaces. Your type of niche can also affect the price you charge but as an example let’s take a look again at Yaro’s site and what he charges for the different type of ads he has…

Not every blog will earn that amount per month, I am not saying it isn’t possible but every niche and blog has its own qualities, but what if you had several blogs all making a few hundred £$ a month. That would be good wouldn’t it?

The next time you are surfing the web, take a look at the sites you visit and see if they have any private adverts, maybe even send them an email asking how much they charge, you might be amazed to see that some of the smaller sites with very little traffic earn enough each month to cover all the running costs and make a nice profit on top. Imagine what they will get when they become bigger and more established.

I know for a fact there are people who sell this information. Recently I saw a guy charging £15 ($24.20) for what I am going to tell you. The really annoying thing is that it isn’t really anything new, many marketers know about this but what is amazing is that there is a lot more people who don’t know much about this method or the power that it has.

This method can convert better than most of the banner ads you see on sites, people have gotten so used to seeing adverts that they have what is commonly called ‘banner blindness’ not only that but people believe most banners are dodgy.

This method has become very popular with the stay at home mothers and fathers who became bloggers and is very popular with internet marketing forum owners and YouTube channel owners. This method works on the power of recommendations, stop and think about it, when a good close friend recommends a restaurant to you what do you do? The chances are you will listen and visit the restaurant when you next go out for a meal.

Bloggers would write about things they used, whatever the niche they were involved in they would review a product that they used and really liked. This review and recommendation would increase sales of that product; if the blog had a big reader base then the review could have a big impact on the sales and recognition of the brand.

Companies noticed these bloggers mentioning their products in a positive light and giving them recommendations and started to send free products and stuff out to the bloggers. They then would review and recommend more products which would increase the sales.

Now reviewing products is so powerful that many affiliate marketers started to create what become known as Google Sniper sites, named after George Brown’s hugely successful Google Sniper product. These sites were created around a product and created around a set of keywords that would allow the site to rank high in the search engines and be visited by free traffic looking for that exact product.

These sites would be populated with products from affiliate networks like www.clickbank.com, www.paydotcom.com and high ticket items from Amazon. These sites would then have a review of the product as the main article and several other articles and videos that were related to the product.

These reviews are written in a way to give an honest and balanced view of the product explaining the positives of the product and with some negative aspects of the product. They are not pushy or trying to do the hard sell, it just doesn’t work on review sites. They do write the reviews so they offer more positives than negatives and by the end of the review the site owner has manipulated (in a nice way) to make the decision to buy the product through their affiliate link.

Genuine reviews are you recommending a product or tool that you use and like to people who like and trust you, if you have that relationship then you have the power to influence people to buy. Now this isn’t about abusing your power but being genuine and recommending products that you use and think are good. an honest and balanced view of the product explaining the positives of the product and with some negative aspects of the product. They are not pushy or trying to do the hard sell, it just doesn’t work on review sites. They do write the reviews so they offer more positives than negatives and by the end of the review the site owner has manipulated (in a nice way) to make the decision to buy the product through their affiliate link.

Un-boxing is a video phenomenon where brand new products like iPads, notebooks and other electronic items are unboxed live in front of a camera, switched on and gone through all the workings and software that is on the product. It is a kind of ‘how to use…’ video tutorial and people love these types of videos. They can see what it does and familiarize themselves with the product and make a decision whether they want to buy it or not.

These YouTube channels will have affiliate links in the video description box so the viewer can click straight through to buy it from places like Amazon. These videos are a great way of making commissions without the hard sell because all you do is show what the item does and do a simple honest review. Not everyone likes selling and trying to convince people to buy items they probably don’t want or need.

If you want a more honest and less pressurised way of making money online then the review and un boxing method is probably for you. Remember, there is no limit to the amount of things you can review or how many reviews you write and share on countless websites.

So what do you think? Is this the method for you? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below.

Before the recent property crash it seemed everyone wanted to be a property developer.
Every TV channel seemed to have it’s own property show, following newbie developers buying derelict and rundown property and try to transform them into beautiful homes making them thousands of pounds within a short time.

Some did well some didn’t do too well, some broke even and some lost money. Property can make good money fast if you do everything right but even then that doesn’t guarantee a sale. You might have a fantastic property in the best location; you might have got it for a rock bottom price, spent a minimal amount on developing it up to a stunning standard and still not get a sale due to the fact people do not like it.

The market can change half way through developing the property, it could take ages to sell it once it is finished. The amount you earn from the sale of a house can be the equivalent to a year or twos wages however to make that amount you could be juggling large amounts of money.

Much of that is debt, loaned from banks with large monthly re payments. In many shows we see people stressing as they have mortgages for both their own home and the developing property, running into re payments of thousands each month.

Every month the property isn’t finished and sold it eats into any profit. As an example after borrowing a sum of £200,000 to buy a property for £150,000 with £30,000 pencilled in to develop the property and then sell the property hopefully after 3 months for £210,000 then you make £27,000 profit after £3,000 has been paid in mortgage re payments. That is a small profit from a large layout.

Wouldn’t you prefer to spend £27,000 and make a £210,000 profit? Well with the internet that is what can happen and it happens regularly. Every website and blog should be seen as being an online property, they may not be made of bricks and mortar but they are worth something to people and when created properly with a plan they can be worth far more than you put in.

Recently I went to a local restaurant with my girlfriend at lunch time for a special all you can eat buffet they do, after stuffing ourselves and having a few drinks we had spent £25 in about an hour. That isn’t a huge amount, and as for a restaurant it was incredible value for money but the reason I am telling you this is because you can host a whole website for less than that.

The image below shows a basic hosting plan at £1.66 which is £1.99 per month when VAT is added. 12 months at £1.99 is £23.88. In the USA the hosting can be as little as $47. There is the added cost of registering a domain which is around £8 and $8, so for around £40 and $60 you can have a website for a whole year. Now I know you are starting to understand here, that is nothing is it when you compare that price with the price of a meal.

Selling Websites

Now here is the really important thing to consider, sites can be sold for thousands of dollars at sites like flippa.com. Ramsay the BlogTyrant has sold several blogs around the $10,000 price tag. He sold his first when he was at University after 8 months of starting it.

As another example I want to show you a blog www.PattayaGirls.org that is less than a year old, it has only 3 pages and 6 articles on it, it was switched off for several months due to the creator becoming ashamed of the content of the site, and he set it live once again when he decided to sell. It made no monthly revenue and hadn’t been live for a whole year but it still sold for $2,200.

Normally a website is valued at what it earns in revenue in a month then that is multiplied by 12 or sometimes 24. If people can see that a site has potential they will pay a lot more than its value. Some sites don’t always sell for the expected value however they can still be far more than what you paid for it.

You have to build the site up though, the example of the PattayaGirls site is that it was built around 2 keywords that were searched for a lot but had very little competition and to some people the site had a huge potential for revenue from Google AdSense, CPA offers and private advertising.

The website itself is a basic WordPress site, the hosting only needed to be basic due to the amount of stuff on the site. For the cost of £40 $60 the site sold for $2,200. Now doesn’t that sound a lot better and a lot less riskier? Even if you only managed to sell the site for £100 you have still earned £60 profit from a little outlay. There is no reason why you cannot make a lot more than £60 on a site from a years part time work.

Put it this way, you can risk losing it all developing property for profits that are far less than the amount you borrowed or risk the price of a meal or two over a year and at worse get your investment back. Imagine having several sites being developed over a year. Creating opt-in forms and building email lists with email newsletters set up to go out each week.

With so many people wanting to become internet marketers, or have some form of online affiliate marketing business, creating sites with a years worth of posts and email newsletters, opt-in forms and squeeze pages could be worth a quite a bit to many.

For a newbie who has no idea how to create a website or an email newsletter, creating one for them with a years worth of content will save them a lot of time and work, would that not be worth a lot to people? They can get on with sending traffic to the site and building a business with ease.

All the extra work you can do, all the money you can generate each month adds value to your site. The work is little and nothing compared to the hard work that is involved in developing bricks and mortar properties.

You could go the usual route of setting up an offline business where you rent a property like a shop, pay for business rates, utility bills, stock and staff before you have even had anyone through the door. You might be lucky and double the cost of the items you sell but usually you will only make a small mark up on the things you sell.

Now doesn’t investing just a few hundred pounds or dollars a year with a potential return of thousands sound a lot better?

post each week that was 500 words long and weak. So here we go with another great instalment. I want to talk about traffic, simply putting it a website is nothing without traffic. We all need traffic and it isn’t the easiest thing to get, let’s get serious for the minute. In our niche, the blogging and make money online niche aka internet marketing is very competitive and saturated.

Trying to get organic free traffic using SEO techniques based around keywords these days is so hard because all the keywords we want to use are being used by everyone and have been for ages. Long term marketers have paid big money on keywords when Google would allow you to send traffic to your squeeze pages via their AdWords system, those days are gone but the legacy of those days keeps the keywords well out of our grasp.

We can spend a lot of time creating backlinks with commenting and guest posting but after the recent Google updates these have to be proper and ethical otherwise it can go against us. We can no longer go about posting links on every dormant site we find and spamming the crap out of the internet. Everything has to be done proper.

Link farms and article directories no longer have the strength they once did and many blog networks had their link juice and power slashed by Google completely rendering many blogs floating in search rankings abyss.

As I mentioned earlier we can no longer pay Google to send people to our sites as they seriously frown upon internet marketing, it has got such a bad name that they refuse to believe that people can make money from the internet even though they do! There are so many things that you need to have in place for Google to send traffic to your site. Squeeze pages, affiliate scrappers and email harvesting sites are a definite no.

Blog sites might be ok as they are delivering constant helpful content and a great user experience which is what Google wants from a website.

We can work hard at making videos and PDF reports to share sending traffic to our sites from YouTube and similar networks. They can work but you really need to throw yourself into it and go for it big time but many of us hardly have the time and/or the money to make it happen.

Money is something that can make building an online business easier and quicker if you have it. If you have some money to invest and have a way to generate money from your site then I might have a special secret traffic source that could take away the pressure of SEO, Google and SERPs forever.

I will warn you, this doesn’t work with internet marketing sites such as squeeze pages etc but if you have a large content site with very informative internet marketing posts then you might be ok.

If your site is in other niches then this could seriously work for you like a dream. You could be sending people to your site from seriously large popular sites like CNN and FoxNews for pennies and make more than what it costs you.

Like everything you MUST keep an eye on the costs and your earnings so you don’t destroy yourself before you start!

So what is it I am talking about?

Outbrain.com The Secret Traffic System

Have you heard of Outbrain.com? No? Well that isn’t surprising, not many marketing gurus will tell you about it as they have been secretly using it to drive traffic to their content sites. Outbrain.com is a content suggestion engine and they will put people’s articles (yours) onto sites within their network, sites like Foxnews.com

Simply putting it, you pay for your best articles to be recommend to the readers of some of the biggest sites on the web. These sites have the Outbrain.com widget on their sites that shows recommended articles and they get paid for it.

In the screenshot above taken from Foxnews.com you can see a [What’s This?] tab, when you click on it you will see the Otbrain.com details open up in a little pop up screen.

Outbrain.com charges on a Cost Per Click basis however they charge once a month so if you used a credit card and had people sent to an article that was surrounded by high paying and high converting adverts you can earn more than what it costs and be able to pay off your Outbrain bill with comfort.

Now the main things to remember here are Outbrain.com is about content, they do not allow you to send traffic to an article on your site that is littered with affiliate offers. They are not bothered if you have adverts around the sides or sponsored adverts like Google AdSense embedded with the article post but naked or cloaked affiliate links in the actually article text itself is a no no. Make sure you follow their terms and conditions properly otherwise they will close your account and you really don’t want that do you?

This can be a serious little goldmine, imagine having your article listed on some of the worlds biggest sites, sending traffic your way and then earning revenue from the high paying adverts on your site. This could be the $1 in $5 out system that you were looking for, or maybe it could be $1 in and $1,500 out like MoneyNews.com who sells sponsored links on their site for $1,500 per month.

Get several paying clients like that and using Outbrain to send cheap traffic to your site then you have a license to print money.

Why not generate a lot of traffic and sell advertising space on your site to private businesses at a premium based on the amount of traffic you are getting? Let’s not forget all that extra traffic can build that all important email list fast.

Outbrain is not the only content suggestion engine, there are others like Taboola and Nrelate. So, what do you think? Do you like the idea of getting your articles recommended on some of the biggest sites on the net for pennies and earn an income from Google AdSense, affiliate offers and selling advertising space?